In the related art, there has been proposed a type of toilet seat device in which a toilet seat attached to a toilet bowl is automatically opened (see, e.g., JP 2006-115985 A (Reference 1)). The toilet seat device of Reference 1 includes a footwear detection sensor, which is capable of detecting footwear by detecting a detection target element provided on a toe portion of the footwear when the footwear of a user is on the floor surface in front of the toilet bowl, and automatically opens the toilet seat when the footwear detection sensor detects the footwear in the state where a toilet lid is opened. Thus, when a man, wearing footwear, stands in front of the toilet bowl while urinating, the toilet seat is automatically opened, and thus the man does not need to open the toilet seat with a hand.
Incidentally, in recent years, toilet seat devices have been increasingly configured as washing toilet seat devices that inject wash water to a local region of the user. Such toilet seat devices may include a detection sensor that detects whether a user is sitting on a toilet seat in order to prevent erroneous injection of wash water. In that case, as in the above-described toilet seat device, when the toilet seat device includes a dedicated detection sensor that detects whether a man is standing in front of the toilet bowl in order to automatically open the toilet seat, the number of detection sensors may be increased, which results in a complicated configuration and is disadvantageous in terms of costs.
Thus, a need exists for a toilet seat device which is not susceptible to the drawback mentioned above.